Chapter 42: How to Hide a Corpse
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 42: How to Hide a Corpse
Night, with the daytime lights extinguished. In the pitch-black darkness, only the faint glow of the night lamps illuminated the world. The prison corridor, devoid of any other light, was defined only by its stark, black outlines, as if someone had laid carbon paper over the world and traced it with a pencil. In the heart of an abyss so deep, you wouldn't notice a wall right in front of you unless you were paying close attention.
A man moved through it, silencing his footsteps.
He was carrying a large bundle, from which grotesquely bent arms and legs protruded through the gaps in the knots. They were twisted at angles impossible for a normal human body, angles that could only be achieved if the limbs were attached somewhere other than a vertebrate’s skeleton.
Or if the arms and legs were completely detached.
The sight of him carrying the dismembered body was, to any observer, the movement of someone trying to hide a corpse. He should have been seized and interrogated for his crimes, but the veil of darkness concealed not only his form but his sins as well. What cannot be seen is not a crime. Thanks to the cover of night, he proceeded without any interruption…
“Woof? What’s that?”
“Shh. Azzy, go on now. It’s a surprise gift.”
“Woof? A gift? For me?”
“Not a chance.”
Without being interrupted by any person, he hid the dismembered body in a secret place.
“Woof!”
“Don’t try to dig it up! Hey! It’s not food! Bad dog!”
He hid it. In any case, he did.
*
Another peaceful day. I stood before the chalkboard, having gathered the trainees. As I reached for the chalk, I noticed the box was empty and singled out the Regressor.
“We’re out of chalk. Trainee Shei, could you get some more from the cabinet back there?”
“And you have to make me do it?”
“You’re closer. Please.”
“Tch. Fine. If you’re asking nicely.”
The Regressor sauntered toward the cabinet with a defiant air. I slowly counted her steps.
One. Two. Three. Ta-da.
Just as I’d planned, the Regressor flung the cabinet door open.
In that instant, a body with grotesquely twisted limbs and twitching, crimson muscles tumbled out. Its face, tongue lolling out as if dead, met the Regressor’s eyes for a moment before it began to slowly collapse toward her, along with its severed limbs.
A bizarre corpse, appearing without any warning or context. It was a sight that would make anyone with ordinary courage jump out of their skin.
But the Regressor faced it with a deadpan expression.
“Heavenly Counter Domain.”
As if this sort of thing didn’t even faze her, she maintained a blank face and pushed the falling corpse away with her hand…
‘Aaaaaah—!’
Only her face was blank.
Contrary to her composed exterior, the Regressor was screaming mentally. When a detached right arm twitched, she shuddered and hastily shoved it back inside.
‘You scared me…! What is this?! Why is something like this in the cabinet?!’
Though she was panicking internally, none of this emotion showed on the outside.
The Regressor’s Qi Art, Heavenly Counter Domain—a technique that engraved specific movements onto the body to allow for reflexive responses in any situation—had activated even when she was scared out of her wits. Though her heart was pounding, her highly trained body maintained an imperturbable mind—no, an imperturbable body.
The Regressor glanced back at me and said in a flat tone, “There’s a corpse in here. Hey. You know anything about this?”
‘H-how long has this corpse been in here? Don’t tell me it’s been here since we first arrived? That’s… a little creepy.’
What? She’s already composed herself. Tch. I thought she’d be scared for a little longer. It was my masterpiece of a surprise, but the preparation feels wasted.
Swallowing my disappointment, I feigned ignorance and answered nonchalantly.
“Oh? Since when was that in there?”
At that, Azzy’s ears perked up and she stood.
“Woof! I know! Yesterday…”
“Silence! Where does a beast get off interrupting when a human is speaking?!”
Having muzzled the canine witness, I gestured dismissively.
“It seems someone has hidden a body in the cabinet. We should investigate. Trainee Shei, could you bring it out for a moment?”
“This thing?”
“You’re closer. Please. You’re not afraid of corpses, are you?”
“That’s true.”
The Regressor casually shouldered the corpse. Outwardly, she looked completely unfazed. Even her inner thoughts were mostly calm.
Does the mind follow the body? If it weren’t for that Heavenly Counter Domain technique, she would have made a fool of herself. What a shame.
“Here.”
The Regressor laid out the dismembered body of the Undying. I crouched down and began reassembling the limbs right in front of her. For dramatic effect, I put the tongue I’d pulled out last night back in its mouth and reattached the right arm, whose fingers I had tied up one by one just in case it tried to resist.
As the reassembly progressed and the body began to take on a human form, the Regressor’s gaze grew heavy.
‘It wasn’t a corpse. A muscular giant, dark-skinned… It’s definitely that undying.’
Oh. Finally.
My reason for hiding the Undying in the cabinet wasn’t just to scare the Regressor. That was merely a secondary objective.
According to the Regressor’s memories, this undying man had likely survived to the end in all her previous timelines… which made sense, since he was undying.
In the last timeline, the Regressor, who had been searching for information, met the Undying and heard a rough account of what had happened in Tantalus. To get more precise information, she had infiltrated this place herself.
That was as much as I could read. Because the Regressor’s recollection ended there, I had no way of knowing what information she had heard from the Undying, or what had happened in the previous timeline. It would have been great if I could read all her memories of the last cycle, but for some reason, I could only access them through her reminiscences.
Therefore, to find out why I had died, I had to present the Undying to the Regressor. Only then would even the smallest clue emerge from her mind.
The Regressor asked in a much more serious voice, “This undying, has he been here the whole time?”
“Who knows?”
“That’s impossible. With wounds like these, there would have been bleeding. There’s no way Tyrkanzyaka wouldn’t have known.”
The vampire herself answered the Regressor’s question.
“Nay. If that thing is one of them, as I suspect, then even I would not have noticed.”
The vampire, still using her coffin as a chair today, glanced impassively at the dismembered body.
“An Earthener from somewhere on the plains, I presume.”
“Earthener?”
“As they are also undying, we call them Eartheners to distinguish them. They call us Bloodfiends. Our relations are rather indifferent. They consider us cursed, and we cannot take their blood.”
The vampire raised a hand. The lid of her coffin opened slightly, and a stream of crimson blood slithered out, creeping toward the Undying as if to devour it.
However.
The moment the blood touched the Undying’s body, it rapidly lost its power. The red liquid turned pitch black, crumbled like sand, and fell to the ground.
“Their flesh and blood resemble Mother Earth. They attained their immortality by sacrificing their race as a human offering. Their flesh is sand, their blood is mud. An exceedingly impure and foul body that only they can contain. Thus, even when their blood is outside their body, it is not affected by my Bloodcraft.”
The vampire wrinkled her nose slightly and flicked her hand. The remaining blood, aside from the part that had crumbled to sand, returned to her side. She shook it off as if she had touched filth.
The Regressor nodded.
“…I see. So, no one knows how long this undying has been here.”
Hearing the Regressor’s murmur, Azzy straightened up and said, “Woof, I know! Yesterday…!”
“Silence! How dare a double-digit IQ speak up in the triple-digit club! Even a dog at a village school learns to listen after three years, yet a mere prison guard dog dares to open its mouth?! You’re ten years too early!”
“…Grrr.”
It seems Azzy’s affection for me has dropped a little. I’ll have to brush her fur for at least an hour later to barely recover.
Still, shutting her up for now is the priority. The Regressor quickly lost interest in me and Azzy.
‘What kind of nonsense is he spouting at Azzy now… Whatever. It’s not like his bizarre behavior is anything new.’
This is why one’s usual conduct is so important. Even when I do something crazy, people just brush it off without much suspicion. It seems my efforts to act like a madman have paid off.
‘More importantly, the Undying comes first. He seems to be in critical condition. Can he even open his eyes? If this were the surface, maybe, but in the Abyss where the pulse of life is severed, it’ll be hard for him to recover on his own.’
The Regressor’s questioning gaze turned to the Undying. Even an undying being, who could easily regenerate from fatal wounds, had no means of recovery in the Abyss.
‘The grace of Mother Earth might be an option… if he consumes a massive amount of crops, perhaps. But I don’t know how long that would take. Use a potion? If I do that and it changes the past, my information could become useless.’
So that’s why he ate that pot of bean porridge that no normal human could possibly stomach. It was to regenerate his wounds.
I was originally just going to show him to her and be done with it. Hmm. In this situation, should I just try waking him up?
Alright, I’ve decided. I waved a hand at the Regressor.
“Trainee Shei, you who love men, why don’t you stop staring down at that man’s body with your lecherous eyes and return to your seat?”
The Regressor, who had been deep in thought, suddenly staggered. She barely caught her balance before she could fall and shouted at me.
“W-what are you talking about all of a sudden!”
“This man may be unconscious, but to keep subjecting him to the heated gaze of a man who likes men… well, it just doesn’t seem right.”
“What heated gaze?! I’m straight, you know!”
“What? You like women? Then what about that time you washed Azzy yourself? Were you perhaps washing away not black grime, but your own dark, worldly desires?”
“No! Of course not!”
“True, of course not, right? Because you like men.”
“Th-…!”
Caught in her own contradiction, the Regressor couldn’t retort and could only blush.
The vampire tapped the desk with her parasol.
“Enough.”
She then opened the parasol slightly to hide her face. A voice, sounding a little embarrassed, came from behind it.
“I shall vouch for her. As you ordered, I observed her last time, and when Shei was washing the Dog King, she seemed merely troubled, not particularly conscious of her in any other way. Thus, her claim of liking men is likely true… Oh, my.”
“Wait, Tyrkanzyaka!”
“It is alright, Shei.”
As if she couldn’t bear to meet her gaze, the vampire revealed only her mouth, defending the Regressor with an unidentifiable, warm smile.
“I have given it much thought, and your preferences are but a part of you, are they not? Though you may have forsaken the heavenly law of harmony between yin and yang, I, too, am a monster who defies heaven. We are both beings the Sanctum cannot tolerate, so it is not my place to blame you.”
“That’s not what I…!”
“It is alright. I understand.”
The vampire’s smile, having decided to fully accept her companion, was so gentle that even the sharp-tongued Regressor couldn’t argue.
Trapped with no way out, the Regressor’s face turned beet red as she clamped her mouth shut.
‘If I just reveal that I’m a woman now…! No! I can’t. If I say I’m a woman at this timing, it’ll feel like I’ve lost!’
Her pride is warped in a strange way, too. She considers revealing a truth while cornered to be a defeat.
From my perspective, reading all her thoughts, it’s quite amusing.
Well, she doesn’t know I can read minds. I can just keep reading her thoughts and teasing her.
‘Besides, with Agartha’s Mask that I got from the treasury, my first impression is guaranteed to be perceived as male. To break this suggestion, I’d have to take off my clothes… but I’d rather die than do that!’
So that’s why such a flimsy disguise wasn’t seen through—it was because of another one of those mysterious treasures. The world is full of strange things.
Wait. What did she say? I’d rather die than do that? Or was it I’d rather kill than do that? Who?
I quickly stepped in to resolve the situation.
“Alright, alright. That’s enough of that! Now, let’s try to revive this unfortunate undying!”
…Okay. I’ll stop teasing her. Magnanimously providing the Regressor an escape route, I pointed to the Undying lying there with all his limbs torn off.